The Icerigger Trilogy: Icerigger, Mission to Moulokin, and The Deluge Drivers (58 page)

Williams paced anxiously about, trying to form botanical and zoological expeditions to search out the secrets of the homogenized forest. Even Eer-Meesach had sensed enough danger to veto those suggestions. No man could tell what lurked in the depths of such dense aggregations of verdure. The horrors that were known, such as the kossief, were enough to keep a prudent man aboard his ship. No need for them to hunt up new, exciting ways to die.

The disappointed schoolteacher still found enough wild life nearby to keep him occupied. Like a child playing with a new toy, he watched fascinated as another kossief living near the first took a six-legged herbivore browsing among the dried-out stalks behind the ship. Its flat crab eyes rolled in terror as dull grinding teeth snapped futilely at the leather-tough tendrils dragging it downward.

Ethan watched also, his a fascination of a different kind. The herbivore’s scream was no less pitiable for its alienness. He had a chance to see what his own fate would have been had September not rescued him.

As soon as the kossief had sucked enough blood out of the hapless grazer to immobilize it, the burrower generated heat. Ice melted beneath them both, refroze above them, sculpted and filled by water from the anal nozzle Hunnar had pointed out. Safely protected from scavengers and nonburrowing predators by a meter and a half of rock-hard ice, the kossief settled in to enjoy its meal.

Ethan shuddered. Not a neat way to die. He made a personal promise never to venture alone where either variety of the triangular green plant grew.

On the last day the sailors sped their repairs at the news that a lookout had heard the distant, reverberant cry of a droom. Fortunately, the monster did not come near enough to be seen and the prevailing wind was away from the direction of the cry.

Small four-legged quns the size of Ethan’s hand roamed up and down nearby stalks of mature pika-pedan, burrowing and eating their way in and out of the thick trunks like mice turned loose in a king-sized cheese. They began near the crest of a stalk and munched their way downward, leaving nothing to waste. They preferred damaged or sick stalks, thus helping to preserve the vitality of the forest.

Ethan’s favorite was a thing Eer-Meesach called a meworlf. It had a sausage-shaped body from which dangled thin, jointed, two-meter-long legs. A sack ran the length of its cylindrical back. When inflated, the sack swelled to balloon size. Maneuvering on the subdued breeze within the pika-pedan, the meworlf would drift from stalk to stalk, anchoring itself with four of its ten wiry limbs to a selected trunk and using the other six to pluck away bits of plant and convey them to the small mouth. When finished feeding, the meworlf would remain bobbing lazily in the breeze or release its grasp and let the wind carry it through the forest, bouncing like a ball from one stalk to the next.

Fascinating as the extraordinary fauna of the pika-pedan forest was to Williams, it soon began to pale for Ethan. By the fourth day, he was as ready as any of the common sailors to be moving again.

But when full sail had been put out, the worst fears of the experienced icemen were realized.

“We’re not moving,” Ethan observed, concerned. He turned to the captain. “What’s wrong?”

“I worried much on this, friend Ethan.” Ta-hoding’s expression was glummer than usual. “We had no choice, though. The runner had to be repaired.”

“Of course it did.” Ethan indicated the gently billowing sails low on the masts, the gustily taut ones higher up, above the roof of the forest. “You mean, we don’t have the momentum necessary to get us started?”

He saw the problem now. While the
Slanderscree
was traveling at a respectable speed, she had enough energy to plow easily through the soft pika-pedan. But once stopped, with the thick green pseudopods practically growing over the railings, she couldn’t get moving.

“So what can we do about it?”

“We cannot back up,” said Ta-hoding solemnly, gesturing behind them. “The pika-pedan has grown too tall and thick behind us while we have waited here.”

“What about sending out a crew with axes and swords to cut a clear path ahead of us?”

“We may have to try precisely that, friend Ethan. But I wish I could think of another way. By the time our people could cut a path wide enough for the ship, a decent distance ahead of us, the pika-pedan they first felled would be growing up stiff behind them.

“However,” he said, executing a Tran gesture indicative of hopelessness mixed with resignation, “I confess I see nothing else to be done.” He waddled off to give instructions to Hunnar.

Everyone not immediately concerned with the operation of the icerigger was sent over the side and was soon frantically hacking away at the forest ahead of the ship with axes, kitchen cleavers, anything that would cut. The huge stalks fell easily, squirting water and sap over the frenzied group of foresters, who knew they were racing against the growing time of the stumps behind them.

Even Ethan, using his sword, could cut down a ten-meter tall column of pika-pedan in ten minutes or so, though the constant swinging was wearying to muscles not used to such activity. To provide a path expansive enough for a ship the size of the
Slanderscree,
it was necessary to fell a great many pika-pedan. They couldn’t stop. When the pika-pedan behind them reached underbelly deck level of four meters, they would have to retreat and try to break out as best they could.

As it turned out, they had to quit before they wanted to.

All eyes, on board and in the work party, went to the main-mast observation basket, whose wicker-enclosed lookout was screaming while pointing frantically to the east.

“
Stavanzer
!”

“How far?” roared Ta-hoding, cupping thick paws to his lips.

“Twenty, maybe thirty kijat,” the reply came back from the lookout.

“Coming this way?”

“It is difficult to tell, Captain, at this distance.”

“How many?”

“Again hard to tell. I am sure of only one.” A pause, then, “Still only one.”

There was no need to give the order to abandon cutting and return to the ship. At the news of a stavanzer in the vicinity, a retreat to the raft was a matter of instinct, not debate. Everyone was chivaning or running through the maze of felled pika-pedan stalks without having to be told.

“What now, Captain?” Ethan asked Ta-hoding when he’d made his breathless way back to the helmdeck.

Eer-Meesach was standing at the railing, peering forward out of old eyes. “To most it hints of death’s proximity, friend Ethan. But it could also be our salvation.”

“How can that be?”

“Consider if the thunder-eater passes close to us, Ethan. You know how the stavanzer travels by pushing itself across the ice. In so doing it smoothes everything in its path as flat as a metalworker’s forge.”

“I see. So we can go out the way it comes in?”

“More than that, friend Ethan.” Ta-hoding, overhearing, elaborated. “Once we build up enough speed traveling back down the thunder-eater’s trail, we can then turn the ship and continue in any direction we wish.”

“It is the building up of enough speed that is critical,” Eer-Meesach finished.

“Kinetic energy,” Ethan murmured, and then had to try and explain the unfamiliar-sounding Terranglo term in Trannish.

“It will be not easy.” Ta-hoding was talking as much to himself as to his listeners. “Even if we do pass successfully into the trail, there are other dangers to be considered.” Ethan didn’t press him for an explanation.

“We must make a decision. We do have a choice.” He gestured within an arm toward the bow, his dan momentarily billowing with wind. “We have cut a path a kijat or two ahead of us. We can reset sail and make a run at the forest wall. If that fails, we will then have no room to maneuver, and it will be most difficult to try and back up for another run. Also, I should like to keep that option open, should the thunder-eater swerve and bear down on us.”

“Seems pretty obvious to me what we do,” said a new voice. September mounted to the helmdeck. “We wait and try to slip in behind it.”

Ta-hoding’s gaze traveled around the little knot of decision-makers. His usual jollity was absent now. He was all business. “It’s settled, then,” and he moved to the railing to issue instructions.

Twenty minutes of waiting followed the final preparations. All sailors were at their posts, knights and squires ready to assist when and where they could. The quns had vanished into their holes, and a last meworlf battered itself like a crazed mechanical toy against the stalks as it sought to race out of the area.

Presently, a deeper sound rose above the wind-choir, a periodic breathy grumble like a KK-drive slipping past lightspeed. From his single previous encounter, Ethan knew the noise was caused by the stavanzer’s method of locomotion. Expelling air through a pair of downward-facing nozzles set in its lower back, it could also pull itself slowly forward across the ice on its lubricated belly by means of the two down-thrust tucks protruding from its upper jaw—though that rubbery formation could hardly be called a jaw.

The rumble grew deeper. The
Slanderscree
quivered steadily as the ice beneath it shook to the rhythm of a monstrous metabolism.

Ethan experienced an unlikely urge to climb into the rigging, to get above the wavering crowns of pika-pedan so he could see. But he stayed where he was, out of the sailors’ way.

Murmurs drifted down from those in the highest spars, their eyes focused on something unseen. Their companions hushed them. Ethan let his gaze travel forward.

At the far end of the crude pathway they’d so laboriously hacked from the rusty forest a great mass slid into view. It stood perhaps twelve meters above the ice, a black maw inhaling felled pika-pedan with Jobian patience as the horny lower lip/jaw sliced off the nutrient-rich stalks flush with the ice.

Once, the upper jaw lifted and the huge tusks came slamming down into the ice hard enough to make the kijat-distant
Slanderscree
rock unsteadily. Ice, roots, protein-rich nodules were vacuumed indiscriminately into the Pit: proteins and nodules and bulk to be converted into fuel and cells, ice to be melted and flushed throughout the vast metabolic engine.

Tearing unconcernedly into the wall of fresh pika-pedan ahead of it, the massive head vanished from sight. Like an ancient snowbound train, the dark gray bulk slid across their path. Parasites and other growths of respectable size formed a fantastic foliage of their own on the leviathan’s sides and back, a private jungle none dared explore. The fluctuating howl from the intake and expulsion of air was deafening now.

Fortunately, the thunder-eaters had poor vision and poor hearing. They had no need for these faculties, having nothing to be alert against. The beast slid past, its blunt tail-end vanishing in quest of body and skull, without taking any notice of the
Slanderscree
or its anxiously silent crew.

It was gone, though they could still hear it eating its endless meal as it moved steadily off to the west.

Difficult as it was to be objective when confronted with so over-poweringly grand an example of nature’s diversity, Ethan estimated its length at somewhere between seventy and eighty meters. A mature specimen, but from what he’d been told, not an exceptionally large one. He’d seen bigger himself. He doubted this one weighed more than two hundred fifty tons.

They should have waited another half hour, to be safe, before getting under way, but the sailors were growing restless. Fear that the thunder-eater would perhaps change its path (they were notoriously unpredictable in their habits) and charge down upon them poisoned the sailors’ blood with fear. Finally, even the patient Ta-hoding could stand the waiting no longer.

“All sail on, snap to the windwhips!”

The ice anchors had long since been hauled in. Ponderously, but with far more grace than the thunder-eater, the
Slanderscree
began to move forward. Ship’s bones groaned as the five duralloy runners broke clear their slight accumulations of drifted snow and ice.

The grinding of the runners became a slick abrasive noise as the huge ship picked up speed. Two, four, ten, fifteen kilometers an hour. Twenty. Thirty and a familiar whisking
zing
rose from where duralloy lacerated ice. They were nearing the end of the brief clearing the crew had bought from the forest.

“Hard a’port! Sparmen swing-ho!”

Both helmsmen strained at the massive wooden wheel. Inefficient muscle worked where hydraulics would better have served. A nerve-scraping screel came from the fifth runner, the steering runner, as it slowly turned. Sailors aloft fought to adjust sail and trim adjustable spar lines.

And steadily, with unexpected sharpness, the
Slanderscree
hove to port.

Both helmsmen struggled to hold the wheel steady as their feet left the deck. September threw his mass on the port side of the wheel and Ta-hoding added his. With four bodies straining, the runner stayed turned and the ship continued to come around even as her speed increased.

Then Ta-hoding and September could let go. The feet of the starboard side helmsman touched wood again as the extreme angle of turn was relaxed. They were racing down a broad avenue of clear ice cut by the stavanzer.

On command the two helmsmen let go the wheel, to allow the ship to settle on her own forward heading. With the westwind directly behind them now, there was no worry of swerving violently from the trail. The wheel turned freely to a halt, spinning fast enough to crush a man’s skull. The helmsmen resumed their positions, tested the wheel and found it handled easily once more.

At sixty kilometers an hour they rushed down the slough. Pika-pedan pulp stained the ice below the runners, and the unbroken growth paralleling them became a green blur on both sides of the ship. With the wind behind them, muffled by the surrounding forest, they seemed to fly below the surface instead of above it, submerged in emerald silence.

The quiet made audible to the relaxing crew the horrified shriek of the foremast lookout.